I am not a leftist and I did my PhD in the UK and now work in Africa. But, even so I was wondering if this blog could read and review my dissertation. The title is Shallow Roots: The Exile Experiences of Russian-Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks in Comparative Perspective and I completed it at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 2004. You can find an abstract to the dissertation at the url below.

I’m not gonna click on TheOtherMcCain because I like my blood pressure where it is, but could Otto have been trying (not very successfully, but still) to make a point – that those idiots are not qualified to offer any substantive critique of academic research?

The point is that it’s exciting and even flattering for someone to read your dissertation. Preferably someone whose opinion you care about but you take what you can get. And honestly, I haven’t read Loomis’s dissertation so I can’t speak to accuracy but the summary looks fairly comprehensive. I admire the work ethic.

Oh, yeah, right. Too bad you didn’t get to the part of the site where McCain defends Emmett Till’s murderers….cause you know what grinds Glen Reynolds gears? Metaphors, but not defense of racist murder

I am slowly becoming convinced that Otto is some kind of fairly deep piece of what I can only call performance art being developed here in our corner of the net. The strange combination of depth shown here with the irascibly shallow nature of his ongoingStalin schtick just kind of pry at me.

Also, what he did here goes down as one of the high points of my Internet life, and I was around in the heyday of alt.peeves and alt.tasteless for some of history’s greatest trolling.

Wow, thanks for the comments. I actually never expected anybody to notice the comment and just put it out there on a lark. Sometimes you get lucky. For the record most of my life is pretty transparent and easy to find on places like my blog and the International Committee for Crimea site which I linked to in the comment on McCain’s site. Although neither the comment on McCain’s site or this post have generated any traffic for my blog.

Actually, if you are working on the topic of the Crimean tatars and immigration, I think the case of Crimean tatar minority in Finland would provide a very interesting comparison point.

The group in question was, when it formed in the late 19th century, the only islamic community in Finland, representing a completely alien phenomenon. However, it has not only avoided assimilation to the main-stream Finnish population, but also remained closed to all non-Tatar muslims. Currently, the Finnish Tatar community numbers around 1,000, and consists mainly of middle-class professionals and businessmen. (In practice, their position in the society mirrors the position of the Finnish Jewish community very closely.) There is some quite interesting scholarship on the topic.

I have not done much on Crimean Tatars recently. I had a short piece published in Turkish translation I wrote in 2010. But, that was the last thing I did regarding the group. The English version of the article is available at the url below under the title, “The False Charges of Treason Against the Crimean Tatars.”

I was not aware of the Crimean Tatars in Finland. I know they have a diaspora going back to the 19th century in various Balkan countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, but I did not know about Finland. I have not done any research on Crimean Tatars other than in the USSR in part because I lack the research languages. I know Russian, but not Crimean Tatar or Turkish.